The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  At River Daze Cafe, Moira let Harry use her laptop and showed him the local job classifieds. He looked at the landscaping listings first since he’d worked for his mother and Sal for years, but the pay was terrible. Migrant workers from Mexico were hired for those jobs, Moira said, and it drove down the wage.

  “Look at the restaurant section,” she said as she loaded a tray of loaves into a huge oven. Harry watched the smooth muscles of her beautiful sun-browned back ripple beneath her tank top. He sighed and turned back to the computer.

  He pulled out his notebook and started a list of job prospects. Waiting tables paid better, but he didn’t have the experience or clean clothes for that. He’d washed dishes at a Long Island pizza parlor in high school. But a hot, wet kitchen seemed like a hellish place to spend the summer. He looked at the farmers section. There was one interesting post from a beekeeper. It didn’t pay great, but it mentioned light construction. He preferred working outside, he decided, more than he’d ever realized living in New York.

  At Uncle H’s even when you were inside, you were almost outside, what with the state of the trailer. Harry had grown to love the voices of the wild river and the ever-present wind in the huge trees. The woods were thick with birds and small animals that roamed freely in the absence of humans. He only saw the occasional kayaker hitching back to the launch as he made his way to the grocery store. And Uncle H often didn’t speak for hours apart from muttering to himself. Harry had grown accustomed to listening to the murmuring outside world.

  He emailed three of the listings—the pizza place, a farmer’s market stall, and the beekeeper. He could put Jeff down as a reference. Jeff didn’t know he’d gone to jail, and Harry hadn’t mentioned it. Who else? His parole officer? Stupid idea. His parents? No. He swiveled on his stool to look at Moira, who stood rolling out a pile of dough.

  “Hey, Moira. Can I put you down as a personal reference?”

  She laughed and pushed her hair out of her face. “So forward, Harry! I mean, I just met you.”

  His face flushed. “Oh, right. Sorry. I just—”

  “Kidding, dude! Sure, you can put me down. You’re not an ax murderer or anything, right?”

  No, just a small-time criminal, he thought. Not even a good one.

  She gave him her last name and her email address. She also invited him to a party at her house. She told him to come back to the café at 5:00 p.m. and he could ride with her.

  “My friends are cool. You’ll like them.”

  Harry’s heart thrummed. She was so pretty, and she smelled like cinnamon and melted butter. Things were looking up. He waved and left the café, pretending he had somewhere to go. Killing time until 5:00 p.m., he walked through Hood River’s small downtown to the waterfront.

  The wind picked up as he neared the river and whistled in his ears. He could see whitecaps out in the green water and a flash of activity in the middle of the channel. He’d seen windsurfers at the Jersey shore, and there were a couple of those out there, zipping around like furious plastic sharks. But there were these other things—large paraglider-like things flying high over the water. Harry walked closer and saw a sign that read, “Kiteboarding launch. Spectators use caution.”

  People in wet suits were pumping air into the big kites. Harry watched as one guy holding a bar signaled to a woman clutching a kite at the other end of the lawn. She released it, and the man steered it overhead. Harry watched the guy walk down to the river with the kite flying above him. Then he hopped on a wakeboard and sped off across the water. It was mesmerizing. People zoomed across the river and back. They launched high in the air, suspended for long, impossible seconds. They did flips and complicated tricks. Out on the large sandbar that spilled into the river, he saw dozens of wet-suited figures launching and landing the great colorful kites.

  Harry bit into one of the cinnamon rolls Moira had given him, still warm from the oven. Drizzled with honey, it made his teeth ache. A big guy crossed his field of vision with a bright pink kite under one arm and a board under the other. He put his gear down next to Harry.

  “Damn! Well, that was a day for paying dues,” he said with a laugh, and flipped his long, wet hair out of his face. “I prolly shoulda stayed home and organized my sock drawer.”

  The guy seemed to be talking to Harry. So he asked, “Bad day?”

  The big man cracked his neck. “Nah. Not too bad. The wind’s dying. Been fluky,” he said, swimming his hand through the air. “Up and down. But hey—any day out here is better than a day at the office, right?”

  The guy flipped his kite over and pulled a valve open. Air rushed out, and the kite deflated into a limp pink sheet.

  Harry watched as he began to fold it up. “Is that hard to learn?” he asked.

  The other man laughed and jerked his thumb at a collection of trailers near the water.

  “The kite schools will tell you it’s easy. But I’m a reasonable man, so I tell people the truth. It’s a challenge. You have to get out there and stay out there and figure it out on your own. Schools have Jet Ski support and walkie-talkies and all that, but the bottom line is you gotta learn what the wind wants to do, and then hold on when shit goes sideways!”

  He eyed the cinnamon rolls. “River Daze? Oh, man, I love their honey buns.”

  “Have one,” Harry said, pushing the box toward him. “I can’t eat both.”

  Harry insisted when the big guy protested, and he picked up the pastry, dwarfing it in his big paw.

  “I bet it’s expensive,” Harry ventured.

  The kiter unpeeled the cinnamon roll and shoved a piece in his mouth and nodded as he chewed. “Well, brand-new gear, a full set of kites, lines, harness, and board—you can spend four or five grand.”

  Harry looked closely at him. The kiter didn’t look like he had four or five grand lying around.

  “But you can get used gear for a fraction of that. Around here at the end of the summer, sometimes people just give shit away.”

  Harry looked skeptical, and the guy grinned.

  “Serious, man. Some of these people don’t know what to do with all their money. That’s why we need a revolution!”

  He pumped a fist in the air. Harry thought of Marty and blanched, but the big guy laughed.

  “Just kidding! I’m way too lazy for that shit. Besides, all’s I need is wind.”

  He shook his wet hair out of his face. “And beer,” he said. “Now I really need a beer.”

  He wiped his hands on the grass, stood, and reached down for the folded kite with one hand. He held out the other for a fist bump.

  “Thanks, brother. Name’s Yogi,” the guy said.

  “Harry,” Harry said.

  “See ya around, Harry.”

  Harry looked out at the water again, at the sandbar, where two dozen kites had landed and people were wrapping their lines around the control bars. Maybe Moira would think it was cool if he became a kiter, Harry thought, and he stroked his upper lip.

  What Moira thought was cool became clear later in the evening at her party. Harry was one of a dozen guests—all guys except for one sour-faced girl, who stared at her phone and didn’t talk to anyone. When Moira said he would like her friends, she must have thought he’d be into kayakers—hulking guys with loud voices and big beards that made Harry feel scrawny and lamer than ever.

  She’d been so nice to him, but now he understood she was nice to lots of guys. She buzzed around the party, flirting with everyone without focusing too long on one person. She had delegated the grill to the biggest guy, named Hootie, who ran a food cart somewhere in Portland. He looked like he could have picked Moira up in one hand and flipped burgers with the other. Clearly the alpha. The others surrounded him, all bragging about their afternoon river sessions.

  It felt like high school all over again, only it was the kayakers instead of the football team. Harry had never managed
the macho camaraderie necessary to fit in. Instead he went to the shop after school when he didn’t want to go home to an empty house. Mr. O’Brien, the crusty old shop teacher, had shown him how to use every tool—the table saw, the chop saw, the jointer, the planer, and the router. But nobody under thirty knew what a router was. Making dovetail joints was definitely not as cool as shredding Class V white water.

  In his uncle’s wool shirt and his dirty pants, Harry felt like Bilbo Baggins when the trolls were about to make a meal of him. He sat by the bonfire and sipped his beer, morose, and thought of the long journey back up Highway 141 to BZ. What an idiot to think someone like Moira could actually like him. She had offered to lend him a bike, at least—an old Schwinn her last roommate had left behind.

  Moira was giggling at something Hootie said. Harry would not be crashing on her couch, as she had suggested earlier. He could see there would be lots of competition for that. Harry stood and stepped out of the light of the bonfire into the shadows. He walked around to the side of the house, grabbed the old Schwinn, and rode away.

  The wind rose in the dark and blew over him like a blessing as he climbed the highway toward Uncle H’s trailer. He felt better and realized that being alone wasn’t always bad. Sometimes being by yourself was better than keeping the wrong company. He felt happy, choosing that. He still had no clear plan, no job, and no friends here. But it was okay. Somehow, he knew it was going to be okay. And he would go see his uncle at the hospital tomorrow.

  The wind gusted and buffeted the bike. Harry, who rarely had confidence in his ability to make good choices, felt briefly, wildly happy and didn’t know why. He looked up at the sky above the highway. A band of stars shimmered in the long corridor of trees. He could hear branches creak and groan as the wind blew through the forest, building in force as a front moved through the deep river gorge. He thought of the kites and the white froth of waves out on the wide green river. He rode twelve miles uphill and didn’t even feel tired.

  He dismounted at Uncle H’s mailbox and walked down the rutted road to the trailer eating a River Daze kitchen sink cookie, his last bittersweet taste of the day with Moira. He made a list in his head of the good and bad things that had happened and thought about how he would write them down in his notebook. He leaned the bike against a tree, climbed the ladder, and stood at the door, looking up at the stars before crawling into bed. He didn’t feel the eyes on him in the dark just beyond the first row of trees. Watching. Hungry.

  8

  Bee Space

  Requisites of a complete hive . . .

  5. Not one unnecessary motion should be required of a single bee.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  Alice awoke with a crick in her neck and a sense of foreboding. She hadn’t slept well, listening for sounds from the guest room indicating that the boy might need help. Though she hadn’t heard anything, her worry kept her vigilant. It was like when her mother was in hospice and Alice had spent those last weeks sleeping on the couch in her parents’ town house. Even though there was a night nurse on duty, Alice only dozed for a few hours at a time with an ear turned to her mother’s room. One night Alice fell into a heavy sleep, and the nurse shook her awake to tell her that Marina had passed.

  Last night she had listened, heard nothing, and asked herself again just what in the hell she’d been thinking bringing the kid home with her. It was so unlike her, so impulsive. And getting up in Ed Stevenson’s grill! It just wasn’t her way. She didn’t involve herself in other people’s dramas. Well, apparently, she did, because she hadn’t paused to think. It was like stepping off a dry bank and entering a rushing river before gauging its depths.

  Not a mile from the Stevensons’ driveway, the white heat had evaporated and the victorious rush of confronting a bully had drained out of her like air from a birthday balloon. For one thing, her threat of calling her brother-in-law was a bluff. Though Ron Ryan was, in fact, the Hood River County Sheriff, he hadn’t spoken to Alice in months and would not have picked up the phone if she’d called. And though it was true that she was looking to hire someone, she didn’t have a job for Jake. She needed someone able-bodied to help her on the farm. Someone who could lift heavy things and dig holes.

  And the idea of offering room-and-board—where in the hell had that come from?

  She heard her parents’ voices in her head.

  “Aggressively compassionate!” Al hooted. “That’s my girl.”

  “Pot, kettle, black,” said Marina.

  She had glanced at Jake, who sat with his head back and his eyes closed, smiling, and bit the inside of her cheek in frustration at herself.

  Once they had arrived at the farm, it seemed like the right thing to invite the kid to stay the night. She made dinner and they managed an awkward conversation that expressly avoided the particulars of the job description on her side and any mention of his father’s behavior on his.

  Now Alice lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, her eyes grainy from lack of sleep. She had no idea what his physical needs were. She’d been the one to invite him, but did she have to take care of him now?

  “The boy isn’t a puppy, Alice,” her mother’s voice snapped in her mind. “Make him breakfast and save the hard questions for later.”

  Sensible even in the afterlife—that was Marina Holtzman. Alice got out of bed and pulled on her clothes. She heard a door open and the sound of running water from the guest room. That was something. Her anxiety eased a notch, and she went into the kitchen.

  As she made coffee, Alice reflected wryly that the accessibility of the house had proven itself, anyway. She’d renovated the one-level rancher thinking that her parents would move in someday: the ramp, widened doorways, and a fully accessible guest room and attached bathroom. But no one had maneuvered through its hallways until last night. Jake wheeled himself in the front door and down the hall. He’d spun the chair and smiled.

  “Nice digs, Alice,” he said.

  Despite the smile, he looked tired. Alice was exhausted too and happy to turn in early when they finished dinner and he said he didn’t need anything.

  Alice looked out over the field, where the sun lit upon the white beehives. She could see it was windy already as she watched the cottonwoods and Doug firs tossing their branches. Not ideal weather for checking the new nucs as she had planned.

  “Coffee first, dearie. Always coffee first,” her father’s voice said.

  She sat at the table and pulled up the weather forecast on her laptop. It would be windy early, tapering off in late morning. She could do her hive check later. For now she could show Jake around the farm and introduce him to the bees. She’d find a way to broach the subject of the actual work involved and ease him into an understanding that he couldn’t possibly do what she needed him to—lift bulky brood boxes and hundred-pound honey supers and dig holes for fencing and the like. There was no way he could do any of that from a sitting position as far as she could see. But she could let him stay for a couple of days, until his father cooled down. That made sense, and surely, he would understand.

  She heard the sound of wheels on the linoleum behind her and turned, smiling with the false cheer of someone who was accustomed to being alone in the morning and liked it that way but who was brought up to make an effort to be polite.

  “Good morning,” she said, and then stopped cold at the sight of his long, wet hair draped behind one shoulder like a punk mermaid.

  He looked embarrassed and pulled the long shank with one hand. “Pretty rad, huh?” he said, trying to smile and shrugged. “I really needed a shower.”

  He looked so young and vulnerable with his wild hairdo undone, and Alice felt herself soften.

  “Not too formal around here,” she said, waving a hand at her rumpled shirt and Carhartt overalls. “This is standard coffee-hour attire.”

  His face brightened, and he looked over her shoulder to the kitchen. �
��There’s coffee?”

  Alice moved to stand, but Jake rolled up to the counter and poured himself a cup. He maneuvered over to the table and sat next to her and looked out the window.

  “Wow! I’ve never been this far out in the orchards. Your place is amazing. Is that all yours out there?”

  Alice loved the beauty of the sunlit meadow and adjacent forest land, but it surprised her that a teenage boy would notice. She nodded and gestured south. “Out to the fence line is all my place. And on this side, past the barn. Then north to the road. I’ll show you after breakfast. You hungry?”

  He nodded and moved to follow as Alice rose and went to the kitchen.

  “Let me help,” he said. “I make a mean piece of toast.”

  Alice turned and smiled the polite smile of the reluctant host. “I’ll do breakfast this morning and then we’ll see—” She stopped.

  Hearing her hesitate, Jake’s smile dimmed. Surely, he understood that this would never work.

  He cast his eyes down and then back up at her as if steeling himself. “Listen, Alice. You did me a solid last night. I won’t be a burden around here. I’ll carry my own weight. I’ll—”

  She waved a hand at him, feigning lightness. She thought of what her mother would say in a situation like this, though Marina Holtzman would never do something so rash as insert herself in another family’s conflict. And then there was the wheelchair. She had no idea what kind of needs the boy had.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jake. We’ll figure something out.”